The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Waning Gibbous

    Last night I got a picture of the Waning Gibbous phase of the moon. What’s funny is I went to bed thinking I was going to miss the shot because the moon had already set for the day. I woke up at 3:48am and noticed bright moonlight shining through our window and realized I had misread the Virtual Moon Atlas software I use. So I got up and spent about an hour outside then went back to bed. I now have 2/8 of the pictures I need for my project.

  • Where’d the evening go?

    Tonight flew by. We went to the grocery store immediately after work to pick up dinner (filet on the grill…mmmm). As soon as we got home I mowed the grass and Ana proceeded to clean up around the house. Before we knew it, it was 7:30 and I hadn’t started the fire for dinner.

    I used my new Cordless String Trimmer by Black & Decker after mowing. As I hoped, it worked great. I highly recommend it, and you can’t beat the price.

    And in an unexpected turn of events, No TV Week is still having an impact on our lives. For over the past week we haven’t had the television on as we are sitting in bed at night. Even the evenings have remained remarkably quiet!

  • One down

    I did get to go outside tonight with the telescope, and it was fairly clear. I ended up taking 30+ pictures, and only one of them looks like it’ll be a keeper. At first glance, alot of the ones I took look good but with closer inspection the edges are blurred.

    One moon picture down, 7 to go.

  • Full Moon

    I’m starting a project aimed at getting 7-8 pictures of the moon, with the telescope like these, at its various stages. It will probably take me a while to get done because of the timing and weather but I think the end result will be pretty cool. Once I have them taken, I plan on utilizing Ana’s newfound mat cutting abilities and arrange them in a nice frame.

    Tonight just happens to be a full moon, so I hope it stays clear so I can mark that one off the list.

  • Cardinal Game

    Just got back from the yearly Cardinal game with work. We were in a luxury box along the firstbase line, had a great time. One thing’s for sure, large quantities of tequila = large headache. Been a while since I’ve had a hangover, time for large glasses of water.

    For an unknown reason, I had to hard reset my Treo today. It did the thing where you can’t turn Wireless Mode back on until you soft reset it. When I did this, it went into a cycle of boot, reboot, boot, reboot… really sucked and I wish I knew what caused it. I’ll have to keep my eye on this.

  • Rain, Rain, Rain

    Contrux dug our trench to bury the sump line on Thursday, but we have no idea why they stopped there and didn’t finish the job. So now we have a trench about 30′ long, 1′ wide, and 1.5′ deep (something like that) on the side of our house running to the easement in the backyard. With all the rain we are getting, it’s really looking like a moat.

    Ana called on Friday morning asking why they didn’t finish, and the secretary didn’t have any notes on the issue and told Ana that she had no way of finding that out. WTF. The lady said they would probably be there that day to finish it up. As soon as I got home and found it in the same state as Thursday, I decided to give them a call. Again, same thing – they took our name and number and made a note to find out what’s going on with it. I haven’t heard back so I’ll probably be calling again today, just to be a pain in the ass to them.

    I should toss some pictures up of it, it’s a real mess and the sod they dug up will most certainly be dead once they finally get back to finish things.

    Continue reading “Rain, Rain, Rain”

  • House stuff

    Yesterday, Ana called Construx (the company that built our house) about two outstanding issues. #1) We still have a ‘temporary’ sump line running out of the house, dumping water into what is now a small moat between us and the neighbors. #2) about a month ago the doorknob on the door going to the garage stopped working with our key.

    The sump line was gauranteed to be buried in the spring so I wasn’t too worried about it. But when Ana talked to a rather uninformed individual on the phone yesterday, she was told that they didn’t know about the sump line. Hmm… at this time I’m wondering if I should be worried. Luckily we have it in writing that they are going to fix it in the spring, that should help if need be.

    The doorknob was supposed to have been ordered a good two weeks ago, but this lady on the phone didn’t have a clue on its status. Supposedly the person that usually takes care of that stuff was out of the office.

    Continue reading “House stuff”

  • Install

    Damn Visual Studio.NET takes forever to install. It has been running for a good 45 minutes and it hasn’t even gotten to the MSDN Library (3 CDs).

    I tried out PalmVNC with my Treo. That’s some really cool software; I highly doubt I’ll ever have a need to use it, but it definitely has geek factor.

    (Disc 1 of MSDN now installing..)

  • Laptop Repaired

    My laptop came back today after a stunning turnaround time. Much to my delight, they did indeed replace the hard drive (serial numbers prove it). However, they said they didn’t find anything wrong with the CDROM. Odd, I haven’t been able to burn a CD in months. After booting I pop in the same CD that refused to burn while I was on the phone with their support guy, and it worked just fine. Don’t know what to make of that.

    They also returned my battery wrapped with tape saying it was defective and should I put it into the laptop and something goes wrong with it, my warranty is void. I’m suspicious, I think it would work just as well as it did before shipping but I’m going to start pricing them regardless.

    Now on to reinstalling everything, what a chore.

  • Apartment: Done

    We have finally finished cleaning the apartment. It’s spotless and we will be turning in the keys at the end of the week. Next up will be to go through the large pile of stuff we transported into a corner of our basement. There’s no real rush to do that though.

    While we had Ana’s parents’ truck, we decided to make a run over to the recycling center with some of our cardboard boxes from moving. I initially thought we just had two or three laying around the house and garage, but ended up with a couple dozen filling an F150. The garage has a lot more free space with that taken care of.